Excel

Excel 2013 has arrived, and for the most part, it's much like Excel 2007 and 2010, but with some spiffy new features, such as Recommended Charts and Pivot Tables, Flash Fill, Quick Analysis, Power View, and more.

Excel 2010 introduced a new "Backstage View" where print preview became embedded into the File menu. Excel 2013 continues this tradition, but you can get your "old-school" print preview functionality back with a few quick steps.

It's not just the IRS that's been madly updating forms for the 2012 filing season. Right on schedule, Glenn Reeves of Kansas has released his sixteenth spreadsheet-based version of the US Individual Tax Return, commonly known as Form 1040.

It's easy to hide worksheets in Excel, but unhiding multiple worksheets within a given workbook can be a tedious exercise. Users who don't know otherwise are relegated to unhiding worksheets one at a time.

We thought it might be fun to share with you a list of our top ten, most-read articles of 2012. Overall, it looks like technology topics are of the most interest to you and your colleagues, followed by career and tax-related stories. Enjoy!

If two items on a list share the same value, MATCH/INDEX will return the same name for both items. Excel expert David Ringstrom describes how to use the COUNTIF function to create a tiebreaker in such situations.

Accountants are often tasked with identifying variances that exceed specific tolerances. Rather than trying to eyeball columns of numbers, you can use Excel's Conditional Formatting feature to make such variances leap out on the screen.

Many users tire of retyping report titles such as "For the Period Ended October 31, 2012" month after month. Excel expert David Ringstrom explains a couple of techniques you can use to simplify, and even automate, such date-based report titles.

Sometimes a formula you craft will return an error, such as #DIV/0! or #N/A. Many users overcome this by using combinations of the IF, ISERROR, and ISNA worksheet functions. However, using these functions in concert can result in complex formulas.

Microsoft Office 2013 has crossed an important threshold referred to in the industry as Release to Manufacturing (RTM). This means the development team has finalized the flagship suite and beta testing is complete.

From time to time, you may need to compare a set of figures or text in an Excel spreadsheet to a paper document, and doing so can be time consuming and error-prone. Expert David Ringstrom offers a better approach.